With Northwood’s first assignments of the KZN Tier-1 season being March dates with Kearsney on their lush green Reece-Edwards pitch in Durban North followed by Michaelhouse up at the Meadows in Balgowan, they might well have been tipped to cause an early season upset or possibly even two. The six pre-season games at the Damelin Night Series provides an excellent lead up to these two regular season games against opponents who are expected to have had less match practice and should therefore be a little cold coming into those Northwood games. However Northwood themselves have just fallen victim to Port Natal in what has to be described as the first big upset of 2013. The White Knights held on to win the start-stop affair 8-7 and by doing so secured a berth in the Damelin Night Series final on 22 February. It’s by no means a train-smash for Northwood. They again produced several positives signs in the match which suggesting they are playing well below their true potential. It also isn’t all about the result at this stage, particularly in light of the fact that the cup final will decide the eventual winners and not the round-robin matches at the DNS. The coaching staff might however be a little concerned that training ground form is not being carried through into live match conditions and that so far Northwood have not gelled as a team. As for Port Natal, they could not have asked for a better start to their year. Their backline was tipped to be the real weapon of destruction for 2013 but it’s hats off to the pack of hard workers in the forwards who have held their own and even taken the fight to their two Tier-1 rivals in the last four days. The absence of big frontrow players could still be a limiting factor for Porties this season. If they can manage this aspect of their game as well as they have during this tournament so far, they are good enough in other departments to hold their own against the best that KZN school rugby has to throw at them.
Damelin Night Series Table to date:
| # | SCHOOL | P | W | L | PF | PA | PD | PTS | BP | TOTAL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Port Natal | 4 | 4 | 0 | 121 | 29 | 92 | 16 | 2 | 18 |
| 2 | Northwood | 4 | 3 | 1 | 82 | 14 | 68 | 12 | 2 | 14 |
| 3 | George Campbell | 4 | 2 | 2 | 100 | 41 | 59 | 8 | 4 | 12 |
| 4 | Port Shepstone | 4 | 2 | 2 | 67 | 95 | -28 | 8 | 1 | 9 |
| 5 | Pinetown | 4 | 1 | 3 | 31 | 84 | -53 | 4 | 1 | 5 |
| 6 | Durban Development | 4 | 0 | 4 | 0 | 138 | -138 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2nd XV Competition | ||||||||||
| 1 | Glenwood Invitation | 2 | 2 | 0 | 46 | 11 | 35 | 8 | 2 | 10 |
| 2 | George Campbell | 2 | 1 | 1 | 29 | 17 | 12 | 4 | 1 | 5 |
| 3 | Port Natal | 2 | 1 | 1 | 33 | 34 | -1 | 4 | 1 | 5 |
| 4 | Pinetown | 2 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 51 | -46 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
@Ruggafan – please email me at Gungetstuft@gmail.com …. buy a donkey
@Amalekite: I know that Port Natal beat Northwood 15-13 last year and in 2011 Porties recorded a 33-15 win against Northwood
@all, have you seen the new Northwood website, very impressed! They are going blazing guns to sort their stuff out. Must of had a huge injection of cash from somewhere because to build a site like that aint easy or cheap. They have no decent web analytics, but that is my bone to pick as it’s my industry. They even taking a leaf out of Westville’s PR book on their stories, ‘Northwood XI outclass Glenwood’, when in the end it came down to 16 runs of 12 balls and Glenwood were 0 for 3, shows Glenwood had the class to make a game of it. The sides are actually probably of similar strength….
@Greenwood: Agree with you. I think this is being used to tweak combinations and work on structure. They would obviously want to win the tourney outright so this loss will hurt but not a train smash. I also don’t think we have seen the full strength squad in action.
Does anyone know how Port Natal fared against Northwood in previous years ?
Both could be very true but I think that this is the NW squad and that they just couldn’t win!
I don’t think they are hiding their cards. They could struggle this year…
I think Northwood are hiding their cards here
Thrashing all the opponents at Porties won’t achieve much besides alerting all the 1st Tier schools as to how strong they are – besides many bloggers seem to agree that this is not the real NW 1st Team at Porties and that the NW coaches are mixing and matching teams in order to fine tune their 1st team squads
Are Port Natal that good or are Northwood not the team we were led to believe they were?